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Bridge building between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, disciplines that on their face appear to be worlds apart, has been deemed by some foolhardy and by others premature, yet as the Solms and Nersessian summary of Freud's affect theory and Panksepp's position paper attest, the time may be ripe and the enterprise fruitful. Most gratifying from a psychoanalyst's standpoint is the call made by Panksepp for drawing, not only on psychoanalytic insights, but for integrating the psychoanalytic method with psychological and neuroscience research approaches. As someone who has been committed to this integration in my own research (Shevrin, Bond, Brakel, Hertel, and Williams, 1996), I welcome these exciting efforts to advance interchange between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.
In my commentary I will be limiting my observations to some of the issues raised concerning the relationship of affect to consciousness, motivation, and action. Insofar as the Panksepp paper is in part a detailed response to the Solms and Nersessian summary